Socially engaged art 3

The Mall

Now the time had come to take our little survey to a bigger broader audience of the Crown Street Mall. We had initially planned to position ourselves near the fountain at the lower end of the Mall but with rain dampening our plans we decided to shift indoors at the opposite end of the Mall, this shift created some additional problems as we now had to share a space with other people who were doing something similar to what we wanted to do. Shifting our project to the Mall increased the difficulties we were having getting people to partake in the survey, most people just didn’t want to know what we were doing or were not prepared to take the time to answer our questions.

In her article ‘Complications; On Collaboration, Agency and Contemporary Art’ Maria Lind states that “Collaboration is without a doubt a central method in contemporary art today.” Certainly with our project collaboration is central to the outcome for what we were seeking, the only problem is getting the collaboration between ourselves and our audience to flow enough to actually get a result that we can put forward for our presentation. While not being a total waste of time, the Mall had failed to deliver the real answers that we were seeking. Out of the couple of participants that did stop to answer our questions the only feedback we got was more in the form of what type of socially engaged art they had experienced rather than what they thought would make for a quality socially engaged art project. What we really needed was a better way of collaborating with our audience.